Buy Yourself a Cold Beer and Watch Those Dancers Swing From Trapezes

Comments (0) By Deborah Jowitt Tuesday, Aug 12 2003

Inotice that the four people sitting at a ringside table are barefoot while I'm watching the five dancers of Incidents Physical Theater bounce off one another in Gauge. The high-powered intersections were devised by Christina Briggs and Edward Winslow, who later, elsewhere in the cavernous room, clamber slowly around a swinging ladder of trapezes, seeking domination. Both Gauge and Pendulum tend to operate on a single dynamic, engaging the eye, but with minimal change or growth. As Gauge ends, one barefoot "spectator," Rosie Herrera, starts to sing sweetly in time with Tara Burns's swaying in a hoop suspended to one side of the low 20 by 32 stage. Stuck, directed by Kelly Drummond Cawthon and Adele Myers and choreographed by the five performers of the People's Touring Project, is a bit formless, but as in Myers's engrossing Slipline (for her own company), the dancers emerge as collaborating individuals. In Gauge's games, varied encounters, and bold dancing by five women, we can view Dominique Godderis as a mischief maker and Myers as her sometime confederate, Diana Deaver and Allison Walton as friends, and Rachel Astern as a loner. It's a rich little world.

photo: Hiroyuki Ito

Reversible: Gilstrip at BRIC

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Crashpad
BRIC Studio
August 1 and 2

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Flipped—by Winslow, Briggs, and Patti Gilstrip —definitely develops. Unnaturally tall, in a long ruffled pink dress, Gilstrip's a loopy debutante beset by demons. When she flips upside down in the unseen apparatus that holds her, there they are on her feet: two rioting puppets with the faces of Mayan figures. Decorum loses out.